Check in, Week 49

Those of you who participated in the Talechasing anthology should have received a lovely surprise in your mail box this week. If you haven't, please let me know in the comments below.

Also, I would also love to hear from those of you planning to work on novels next year instead of, or in addition to, the short story challenges. Are you interested in a monthly check in regarding your goals and progress?

As of this morning I only have one more final left to write! I am not too concerned about it and I feel I have enough time to study. I am feeling a little more free already! Getting our beautiful anthology was the highlight of my week. There may have been a little bit of happy-dancing.

Fun trivia fact: It is colder today in my home town today than it is at the North Pole. Waaaah.

I thought Calla's illustration came out particularly well in the book. The regalia looks terrific. Laura has kicked arse.

That trivia fact ... does not sound very fun. I am sitting here in T-shirt and shorts in sunny Perth. Go Western Australia - unlike those other confused Australian states, we rarely get summer wrong :D

I am so exhausted. October started getting bad, November was hectic, and December is all my nightmares come at once. When I'm not at work dealing with work nonsense, replete with the usual influx of summer's ucking-fimbeciles, I'm running around scrambling after my utterly useless broker trying to force them to send me things or post things off to banks so I don't incur penalties for missing the settlement date. Ultimately those efforts have failed, and today I'm wasting hours on the world's most furiously polite and haughty email, listing their many failures and telling them all the ombudsman-related things I will do if they don't pay the penalty fees.

Thanks to this bullshit, I still haven't done anything about Christmas (that will have to be done in my last two days off for 2013, Tuesday and Wednesday) and I'm in all kinds of stress working out how I'm going to manage it.

The only high point of my month so far was yesterday, when I followed up final inspection of the unit with a lovely restaurant lunch and then back-to-back Hong Kong action movies at my sister's house.

On a related note, I'm still amazed after all the hysteria over the Hadron Collider that there wasn't a peep in the media about the dangers of trying to shoot a movie where Jet Li fights Jackie Chan. Holy shit guys. The universe could easily have imploded from catastrophic concentrations of awesome. (Forbidden Kingdom! World's most forgettable plot meets world's most adorable action legends! WATCH IT!)

Well, this week was supposed to be for celebrating and catching up after the NaNo madness...instead, I spent most of it running around to and from the ER, as my dad had a medical emergency (the details are TMI for Talechasing, I think). I can't even remember what I was supposed to be doing this week, except I have piles of laundry lying around and lots of catch up to do at work. Let's just say I was behind before and now I'm...behind-er :P This year has not been good for parents in general (a lot of my friends' parents are also struggling, too). At least it's been warm and the snow has melted...

What creative projects have you been working on this week and how have they been coming along? Whether you are looking for someone to celebrate or commiserate with, we're always happy to support our friends. Although if you're looking for help with taming unruly characters, you'll likely be on your own for that :D

I couldn't believe how long it took me to edit ours - not even spelling & grammar or the like, but just ensuring a common punctuation standard. I can't believe how many different ways there are for people to choose to break a paragraph, end a line or write a quote!

The thought of doing that for a living makes me pale. You are a stronger woman than I ;)

Earlier in the week (like, Monday), I had the first niggles of an idea for the 'ocean' challenge (btw, I hope the challenges were listed in order - if 'ocean' isn't the first one, I might be hosed XD). A bunch of characters and a 'setting' may have presented themselves, although I don't remember a whole lot at this point. I hope they come back sometime.

Next week, if not today, I'm hoping to put the bajillion NaNo sections in order and reread an old story I was going to start rewriting. May also go to the library to browse around for ideas for the 'ocean' setting.

Always good to get an early start! I look forward to seeing what you come up with. Also, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on ladylight's suggestion in the Talechasing feedback thread. I think we would keep the prompts to provide structure for those that need/want it.

Have you come across something that has set fire to your imagination? Have you found an interesting article you'd like to share? Perhaps you've been reading something good or seen something exciting at the movies?

My new Kobo Touch has been the highlight of my week. I love it, despite its slightly jerky screen. Because I'm a bit of a cheapskate, I think I'll mostly use it to read free e-books. Right now, I've downloaded 'A Study in Scarlet', 'Anna Karenina', 'Middlemarch' and 'Emma' onto it. Already finished the first and am now enjoying 'Emma' - I'm finding it very soothing for the nerves, along with all the Mozart I've been listening to.

There was a lot of reading this week because of all the waiting around at the ER - I finished 'The Etched City', but I think I might have missed the point of the second half, given the state of my nerves by that time. Someday, I'll revisit it, but what I do remember about the book, I really liked.

I discovered that Scott Lynch has finally finished and published the third novel of the Locke Lamora series. *yay* Now, I really need to get my mitts on the second (which I'd been delaying on for fear that, with his health problems, he might never finish the series and I'd be left with another never-ending cliffhanger, like Melanie Rawn's Exiles trilogy).

Would it be helpful to have some kind of space for novel writers to post their own goals and be kept accountable? Is there something else that is on your mind in relation to this community or the way it is run? All suggestions are gratefully welcomed.

I have been thinking a good deal about the project. We now have ourselves a very targeted and very specific set of four themes there. I wonder how many of us are agreeing in the poll that it would be a nice idea that we want to try ourselves, and how many are just agreeing it would be a nice idea.

The theme is a nice idea presentation-wise, but the more I think back to this year, the more I remember how hard it was to coax just the one story - about anything - out of our hardworking participants. And the more I think back to the prompts in 2012 (which were MUCH more general than these), the more I remember how very few people picked up on any of the twelve even without anything resembling a deadline in that whole year. As I recall, the grand total of participants then was 3 ...

There would likely be similar issues arising no matter what we chose as a theme, because I think regular thematic contributions require a lot of discipline - both internally resolved and externally enforced. ;) I find myself a bit lacking in the time and energy to to harangue and marquee at people on a three-monthly basis, and I'm sure everyone needs periodic breaks from whip-cracking in any case. If people don't learn or relearn to associate carrots with writing, they won't respond to the stick on its own, either (even if the stick may occasionally be called for ;P).

If it comes down to direct comparison, the aim of next year's project is the extra writing and critiquing, not the end production of an ebook. The good habits of writing regularly and critiquing, strengthening the idea of writing community, is what needs reinforcing more than anything else. Anything above and beyond is just icing.

All that in mind, it would be my suggestion that the core proposal be modified to the original core concept: once every three months, everyone posts up to 10,000 words of anything they like, on the simple and rather enjoyable expectation that they extend the same courtesy to the fellow Talechasers who have done the same.

That way, even those writing novels or other projects of their own can submit up to 10,000 choice words from their opus (assuming they have indeed been writing something in the last three months, and aren't due a big smack) and still take full and proper part in the community.

If for some unpleasant everyday reason you can't find the time in a given period to read and ponder - though I think even I will be able to keep up with this one - that's no problem. All that happens is you don't submit something for others to look over that round, either.

In other words, the carrot will be regular, stimulating critical discussion each season, and for those with the stern internal fortitude to pursue the prompts challenge to its end, they will also receive an extra big carrot of an ebook. ;)

If at the end of the year we do have sufficient submissions to compile an ebook in the themes of Ocean/Mountain and so on, I will be very happy to hunt down a cover for it and look into means of circulation. Looking over the hush of responses and considering the lessons of history, I have some doubts, but it would be delightful to be proven wrong.